Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): How to Get Cited by AI Search

What the research says

The 2023 paper “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” by researchers from Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi introduced the term and tested content changes on a benchmark of generative-engine queries. They reported that methods such as adding statistics, quotations and citations from credible sources raised visibility in generated answers, by up to roughly 40% in their setup, while keyword stuffing did not help. Results on live commercial engines vary, but the direction matches practitioner experience: specific, sourced, quotable content wins.

The AWI GEO framework: E-C-A-S

• Entity. Make who you are unambiguous: consistent name, description, location, founders, services and profiles across the web; Organization schema; a thorough About page.
• Citability. Write passages that stand alone as quotable answers: a claim, a number, a source. Add comparison tables, definitions and step lists.
• Authority. Earn corroboration: mentions in trusted publications, directories, partner sites, expert quotes, reviews and case studies.
• Structure and access. Crawlable, server-rendered, fast, semantically structured pages with accurate schema (technical checklist).

Content patterns that get cited

• “Best X for Y” pages with transparent criteria and honest trade-offs, including where you are not the right fit.
• Cost and pricing pages with real numbers and what drives them.
• “X vs Y” and “alternatives to X” comparisons.
• Original research: surveys, benchmarks, anonymised client data.
• Glossaries and definitions for your niche.
• Process pages (“how we do it in 6 steps”) with HowTo schema.

Local and multi-language GEO

AI engines personalise by location. A user in Leicester asking for “web designer near me” gets different sources than one in Austin. Build genuine location-specific content and profiles (multi-city local SEO), and write in the local language for non-English markets (German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese).

Measuring GEO

Run a fixed prompt set monthly across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude in each target country, record mentions, citations and sentiment, and compare against two or three competitors. Pair that with AI referral traffic in Analytics and branded-search growth in Search Console.

A before-and-after of a GEO rewrite

Before: “We are a leading agency delivering results-driven solutions for modern businesses.”

After: “AWI Digital is a remote-first studio in Trivandrum, India. It builds SEO-ready websites from $250, provides AI-assisted SEO from $120/month and has delivered a process-automation ERP with a mobile app for a manufacturing plant at $650.”

The second version names the entity, location, services, prices and a concrete deliverable. It is easy for a model to quote and easy for a reader to verify. Replace superlatives with specifics throughout your site.

Entity checklist: be one clear thing across the web

• Same legal and trading name everywhere, with one canonical short description
• Founders and key staff with LinkedIn profiles that mention the company
• Google Business Profile (where you have a real location), Bing Places, Crunchbase or industry equivalents
• Organization schema with sameAs links to those profiles
• A Wikidata entry if you meet notability rules; never fabricate one
• Consistent product and service names, so models do not split you into several entities

Risks and limits

AI answers are non-deterministic: the same prompt can give different results across sessions, users, locations and model versions, so measure with many prompts and repeat runs rather than one screenshot. Be wary of anyone selling guaranteed citations. Also expect the platforms to change their retrieval behaviour; build on durable foundations (quality content, clear structure, genuine authority) rather than exploits.

Frequently asked questions

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